


No Other Version of Me

by Flowerparrish



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: 2012 avengers era, Gen, Inspired by Art, Introspection, Natasha POV, Sparring, Team Bonding, Tony/Nat potential if you squint, Trust Issues, and self-discovery, but it's mostly a story about friendship, marvel rbb 2019, rbb fic, tower fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-19
Updated: 2019-12-19
Packaged: 2021-02-26 01:35:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,133
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21868819
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Flowerparrish/pseuds/Flowerparrish
Summary: Natasha knew what she thought of Tony Stark. Self-destructive. A narcissist. Unfit for teamwork. Not recommended for the Avengers.She even stood by her previous assessment. At the time, after all, everything she reported was accurate and true.What Natasha did not know was what she thought of Tony Stark now.
Relationships: Natasha Romanov & Tony Stark
Comments: 10
Kudos: 39
Collections: Marvel Reverse Big Bang 2019





	No Other Version of Me

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Lets_call_me_Lily](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lets_call_me_Lily/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Art Post: No Other Version of Me](https://archiveofourown.org/works/21869035) by [Lets_call_me_Lily](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lets_call_me_Lily/pseuds/Lets_call_me_Lily). 

> Thanks to Lore for the awesome art that inspired this fic! It turned a lot more introspective than I anticipated; I hope you still enjoy it! And thanks to the Marvel RBB mods for a great event!

Natasha knew what she thought of Tony Stark. Self-destructive. A narcissist. Unfit for teamwork. Not recommended for the Avengers.

She even stood by her previous assessment. At the time, after all, everything she reported was accurate and true.

In the light of recent developments, however, she could acknowledge that maybe her assessment was… incomplete. Hasty, maybe, or ill-timed.

What Natasha did not know was what she thought of Tony Stark _now. _

Natasha did not appreciate uncertainty. Assessing Tony Stark may no longer be a SHIELD mission, but Stark was on her new team.

Natasha was not, as a rule, comfortable working with teams for longer than one mission—_maybe _two.

Working with Clint hardly counted. He was, for one, only one man, and she knew him so well that he may as well be an extension of herself. She knew him better than she knew herself, really. Most of the time.

That Clint was on this new team with her was a comfort. But that would not lull her into complacency in her assessment of the others.

She didn’t plan to _only _evaluate Stark. But the fact remained that she has assessed, and reassessed, the others, and they presented less puzzling pictures on the whole.

Banner was shy, with the kind of aversion to people that stemmed from habit rather than inclination, or maybe resulting from both. He was calm, and sometimes he was angry, but he was always controlled. The veneer of control may be thin at times, but it was always there. Natasha would not go so far as to say she _trusted _him, but she’d share a space with him until he gave her reason not to.

She could make this work.

Thor should have been unknowable. He was, after all, a god, or an alien, depending on who you talked to about the matter. Either way, he was a figure obscured by myth and legend whose time on Earth in the present day had been minimal and not well documented. But he was…not a _man, _and yet very much a man all the same. A good man, she thought. Brash, but smarter than he seemed. Somehow easily underestimated for all of his strength and invulnerability.

She could make that work, too.

Rogers, like and unlike Thor, was ever inch a man—probably even a great one. If asked, before she met him, Natasha would have said that no man could live up to the idealism Captain America had come to represent. She was as much right as she was wrong about it. He was every inch the good man, with none of the prejudices of the past that anyone would expect. Narrow-minded, at times, but that seemed to be born out of inexperience rather than malice. Stubborn, absolutely, but with a tactical mind that impressed even Natasha—something she would not have thought likely (or even possible) given the height of her standards.

He was drowning in grief, but he was also adapting. The first one made him someone to keep an eye on; not _un_reliable, but not steady. But… he seemed to be getting there. He wasn’t her main point of concern.

No, with Rogers, she could make things work.

That’s not to say she couldn’t, or wouldn’t, make things work with Stark.

But it is to say that she needed to observe him more, to find out what made him tick, because she thought before that she knew him, and she might not have been wrong, but she was also not entirely correct. (Natasha liked being wrong even less than she liked being uncertain. Not that she would admit she had been wrong. Not yet. But she didn’t appreciate that the possibility existed, either.)

She would figure him out. And when she did, she would know—not just how he worked, but also how she could work with him. She may not have recommended him for the Avengers years ago, but Stark was an Avenger now, and she was going to make the best of this situation the only way she knew how.

**

“No.”

It was the first thing Stark said when he let her into his workshop two days after she moved into the Tower along with everyone else. She and Clint moved in last—sort of. Steve moved in first, but he’d taken off to explore the country on his own shortly after setting up his floor in the Tower.

Banner had moved in shortly after deciding not to go on the run again—not for now, at least; not yet. For now, he had a floor in the Tower and a dedicated lab space. He was, she presumed, perfectly happy with the scenario. Not that she would _know, _exactly, as she hadn’t seen him since she’d moved in. He stuck to those two spaces in the Tower from what she could tell. That was unsustainable in the long term, but for now, she understood.

Thor had been the one to convince Clint to move in. He was bored, he said, which may have been true. But he had a whole world to explore, so Natasha suspected an ulterior motive. An innocent one, though. Thor had been a part of many teams before; he wouldn’t be so naïve as to assume that they could function the way they needed to function if they barely knew each other. Living together, loathe though Natasha might be to admit it, was strategically sound.

Plus, Clint agreed to move in—he’d been none too comfortable around SHIELD’s headquarters since everything with Loki—and Natasha wasn’t leaving her partner. He was dealing with everything… well, he was dealing with everything. In the end, that was all she could really ask. He was, at least, predictable in his grief: prone to seeking distraction, but emotionally volatile, and he shut down when difficult subjects came up. She’d had to drag him to SHIELD mandated therapy, but he’d stayed the full hour, and he’d gone back the next time with less of a fight. She didn’t know if he talked; she didn’t really care. He went. He was making an effort. Slowly, he was stabilizing.

Thor helped. Thor, while Asgardian, was a far cry from his brother, and he was an excellent distraction. He let Clint drag him around the city on quests for pizza and coffee and whatever other inane things Clint sought, played video games with him, and generally did all the things Natasha rarely had the good humor to tolerate for extended periods of time.

He was a good friend for Clint. That endeared him to Natasha more than she wanted to admit.

This development led, however, to Natasha having an abundance of free time on her hands. She was benched from missions for SHIELD for now—mandatory vacation that was a thin cover for keeping an eye on her new team, and on Clint—with a startling lack of connections.

So she approached Stark on the second day after spending the first day waiting in the kitchen, hoping to catch him. She’d caught Banner, seeking tea, but no Stark.

She waited for him to let her in for one hour and seventeen minutes. She didn’t have the tranquility of a sniper headspace like Clint, but she did have the ability to patiently and unwaveringly focus on one thing for long periods of time, and she put that to good use.

He caved. It was the first new thing—hopefully of many—that she learned about him.

But his first word to her when she entered the lab was a short, sharp “no.”

She raised an eyebrow. “You don’t know what I’m going to say.”

“Don’t care,” he tossed back at her, not looking away from the holograms in front of him. He was poking at them, but she knew his technology well enough to know that he wasn’t actually doing anything—just fiddling to look busier than he was. “The answer’s still no.”

Natasha considered him. She didn’t know what approach to take with him; any attempt at pretending to be appealing in any capacity was off the table because of the animosity he held toward her. It was one thing to put that aside at the end of the world, and another to confront it on a random Tuesday.

She could respect that. No one liked being fooled.

Maybe that would be her way in? Not an angle, but the _opposite _of an angle. Straightforwardness. Honesty. Maybe being forthright and reasonable could win over his analytical mind. The ship of winning over his emotional side had, after all, long since sailed.

“We won’t work well together if you can’t even look at me.”

He glanced over at her… and then away again. “I can look at you.”

“Stark.”

“So, what?”

“So…” she considered her next words carefully, weighing which truth to give, weighing what might make him more defensive, or less. “You want this to work.”

He snorted. But he didn’t say no. Instead, he said, “Or you could just get SHIELD to kick me off the team.”

Natasha raised an eyebrow again; he brought that out in her. A small expression of surprise, often, but genuine and not easily coaxed out. “Why would I do that?”

“You think I don’t belong on the team. ‘Not recommended,’ remember?”

“Yes,” she agreed, and then she steeled herself. “I said that. I stand by what I said at the time. But…” Could she admit this? She hadn’t even admitted her doubts to Clint. Oh, he knew them, but he wouldn’t call her on it, and she wouldn’t voice it if she didn’t need to.

She thought, in this moment, that she might need to. To understand Stark, she needed to observe him with his guard down. To get him to let that down…

“You were correct when you said it that my evaluation happened at a bad time. It may have been… incomplete.”

Stark didn’t say anything for minutes.

Natasha waited.

Finally, he asked, “What do you want from me?”

She considered. “Stop avoiding me.”

“What do I get in return?”

That was a language she spoke. She said, “You won’t do it just for the sake of the team?” He was quiet. Not a yes. Not a no. “What do you want?”

He looked at her then. His gaze was considering. “Teach me to fight.”

“You already know how to fight.”

He raised an eyebrow. “And that means I have nothing to learn?”

Well, no. Of course not.

And, well. If she taught him to fight, if she sparred with him, she’d get the opportunity to see even more sides of him. Besides, teaching wouldn’t keep her as sharp as sparring with a more difficult opponent, but it was better than training alone. “Alright.”

Surprise flicked in his eyes, but just for a moment. It was there and gone, quickly locked away. “Okay. When do we start?”

**

They started with what he knew already. It was more than she expected, given her “practice session” with Happy Hogan. She wasn’t impressed, but it was good to know he had some background training, because even her wealth of patience couldn’t suffer a novice.

That didn’t stop her from teaching him to fall for their entire first training session.

He grit his teeth and bit back any annoyance, though, and practiced falling until he could angle his body so that the impact hit in more durable areas.

It was somewhat juvenile of a lesson, but also possibly the best thing she could teach him. The one thing the armor couldn’t protect him from, not completely, was falling—especially not if it became damaged when he was in the air. Maybe the practice wouldn’t save his life—but maybe it would.

But it also gave her insight into how he handled frustration in an activity most would consider at least mildly humiliating. There was no actual shame in falling—getting back up was the key there—but men could often feel shame over the strangest things.

Whatever Stark was feeling about this lesson, the flush on his cheeks and set of his jaw said that it wasn’t positive. But he didn’t complain or try to refute her instructions. He listened, and he learned.

These were traits she respected.

It left her… unsettled. She had known there was more to Tony Stark than she had assumed, but it was different to see that outside of the context of the field.

“Same time tomorrow?” Stark asked when the hour they had set aside was up.

She raised one shoulder in an elegant shrug. “I’m free.”

He opened his mouth to say something, but closed it after a moment before any sound escaped. He gave one short, curt nod, and left the Tower’s sizeable gym behind.

**

Stark kept true to his word and stopped avoiding the rest of the Tower. He came to the kitchen for coffee, and he even joined Thor and Clint for video game tournaments occasionally. He still spent more time in his workshop than anyone would consider healthy, and he went to company meetings occasionally—but, as he was no longer the CEO, much less frequently than he had before. He went to benefits, charity galas and the like, and… not much else.

“Where is Pepper?” Natasha asked him one morning. She was in the kitchen eating breakfast when he wandered in for coffee. Whether he was functioning on no sleep or too little, she couldn’t tell, but it didn’t seem like a bad opportunity to ask him a question. Maybe sleep deprivation would make him more forthcoming.

It didn’t. He gave a reaction, at least; his hand that was pouring coffee from the pot jerked, and coffee spilled out onto the counter. He swore and jerked his hand back again, finished pouring what was left of the pot into his mug, and set the empty pot aside.

He grabbed his half-full mug and stalked off, not looking in Natasha’s direction.

Not an answer… and an answer all the same.

She didn’t bring up Pepper unprompted again.

**

Stark around Thor was a different person than Stark around Clint, and when Stark was around her he was even more sharply different than around the men.

Stark liked to mess around when he was with Thor. He was happy to think up crazy—not to mention silly—ideas and act on them.

Stark with Clint was snarky. They were like porcupines around each other; all spikes, and yet they must have recognized some kind of similarity in each other, because—as Clint had even confessed to Natasha after a few weeks—they got along. They _liked _each other.

Stark with Banner was cerebral on a level Natasha couldn’t match. She didn’t bother trying. It wasn’t important, beyond noting that of all the facets of Stark she saw, this one looked the most alive.

Maybe that was it. He liked challenges. That, at least, wasn’t at odds with the man she was coming to figure him as.

But it didn’t seem to be _all _of it.

She would also have thought him incapable of reticence, but he remained withdrawn when it was just the two of them. He’d avoid her eyes as often as not, unless they were training together. Even then, he said less words than Clint on a bad day.

It was frustrating. Understandable, but frustrating.

So, she did one of the only things she could think of.

She sought a second opinion. Someone who knew Tony Stark and what he was made of. Someone who could maybe, just maybe, give her somewhere to start.

**

Pepper Potts met Natasha for lunch at a restaurant a few blocks away from the Tower. It was a Wednesday, and Pepper looked as impeccable as always, but Natasha could tell she was busy by the way her eyes creased at the corners.

“Thank you for meeting me,” Natasha said.

“Of course,” Pepper agreed easily, like she didn’t have countless other demands on her time. Natasha admired her charm; it was well-constructed and would be difficult for anyone but a professionally trained spy to see through. “What can I do for you, Natasha?” She stumbled over Natasha’s name slightly; the only tell that Natasha’s time as Natalie Rushman might weigh on Pepper like it did on Stark.

Natasha thought about dissembling. She was good at it, after all. But it seemed… impolite. She didn’t want to waste Pepper’s time when she’d been gracious enough to meet at all. So Natasha said, “I’m trying to get to know Tony.”

Pepper’s composed façade broke instantly. She snorted. “I imagine that’s not going well.”

“No,” Natasha agreed. “It isn’t. I was…”

“I won’t tell you any of Tony’s secrets,” Pepper told her, and she was composed once more. More than that, though, she was steely and firm.

Natasha shook her head. “I don’t want secrets. I just want to know how to clear the air.”

Pepper raised an eyebrow. “Tony has the memory of an elephant, and he’s particularly keen on keeping grudges.”

Natasha raised an eyebrow. “So I should give up?”

Pepper hummed thoughtfully. “That depends. Have you tried apologizing?”

Natasha blinked. She was… surprised. She… honestly hadn’t considered it. “I was doing my job,” she pointed out.

Pepper snorted again, although it was a quieter gesture this time. She took a sip from her water to cover the wry smile on her lips, but Natasha saw it anyway. “So you haven’t, then.”

“Would it matter if I did?”

Pepper shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe.” There was a moment of silence between them before Pepper said, “It would be a good start.”

Natasha could think of many things she would rather do than apologize to Tony Stark for doing her SHIELD sanctioned job. Among them was wearing heels, or withstanding torture.

“I’ll take that under advisement,” Natasha said at last. That was all she was willing to concede.

Pepper nodded, and then she changed the subject. They talked about trivial matters—popular culture, the stock market, SI’s latest tech releases, a little about SHIELD.

“Can I ask you something?” Pepper asked as their lunch wound down. She looked tense when she asked it, and it set Natasha on alert.

“You can ask,” Natasha allowed.

“How is he? Tony, I mean. Is he… okay?”

“You mean, since you broke up?” Pepper’s expression said it all—as if her question hadn’t spelled it out clearly enough. “I don’t know,” Natasha admitted. “I don’t know him well enough to tell. That’s the problem.”

Pepper sighed and nodded. “That’s fair. Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

They parted ways shortly thereafter—Pepper off uptown somewhere, and Natasha back to the Tower and her training session with Tony.

They were up to sparring at this point—actual fighting, even if Natasha always won. Tony was showing improvements, though. He was small, like her, and quick—he picked up tricks that bigger men wouldn’t have known to teach him with ease and incorporated them into what he already knew.

When they broke apart at the end of the hour, but before Stark could leave, Natasha caught his arm.

He tensed, but he stopped and didn’t yank out of her grip.

“I’m sorry for spying on you,” she said.

He looked at her, expression curious. “Are you?”

She thought about it. “Yes,” she said. “I understand the motivation behind it, but I’m sorry I played a part in it.”

He considered her for a moment before he nodded. “Okay.” She waited, but he didn’t say anything more.

She dropped his arm, and he walked away, and she didn’t know if anything between them was different—if this had helped at all.

But… she almost felt better, instead of worse.

Strange.

She pushed that thought aside and went to find Clint so she could spar with someone who would give her a real challenge—and absolutely not simply because he would distract her from the continuing enigma that was Tony Stark.

**

Stark became less guarded around her. It didn’t happen instantly. But he would say hello or good morning to her unprompted, now, and he actually looked at her when they interacted.

He had also, apparently, been shuttering all of his expressions in front of her—even when he was with the others—because now he was so much _more _than he had been before.

He was exhausting.

But he was also vibrant and expressive and alive in a way that compelled her, anathema though that was to everything _she _was.

He also let her into the lab while he worked, where she could watch as he intently focused to the point of forgetting the world around him. When he wasn’t doing that, he talked to his robots like they were people and called them silly names. And when he wasn’t doing _that, _he talked to her. Oh, he didn’t need her to respond, or so he said—having something or someone to talk at was the important part, apparently—but she learned more about him this way in a few weeks than she’d learned in all the months before.

She honestly didn’t notice that she’d begun spending so much time, with regularity, in his lab until Clint pointed it out.

“You like him,” Clint told her over cartons of Chinese food at two am while they watched shitty romcoms that she absolutely did not like. At all.

“What’s to like?” she asked.

Clint shrugged. “I dunno, ask yourself that. If you don’t like him, then why else do you spend most of your free time hanging out with him?”

Which was absurd, because Natasha “hung out” with all of one person—Clint—and to do that, one needed to be friends with the other person. Natasha Romanov and Tony Stark were not _friends. _

Clint laughed when she pointed this out to him. “You’re teammates, though,” he said. “That’s, like, almost worse than friends. And you choose to spend time with him, so it’s hanging out.”

“I’m just trying to figure him out,” Natasha insisted, unsure why she suddenly cared so much about arguing this point.

“Okay,” Clint agreed easily. Too easily. Then he added on, “Whatever you say,” just to really drive home his disbelief.

Natasha took the high road by ignoring him. He was unbothered. Ugh, Clint could be the _worst. _

**

To prove to herself that she didn’t spend inordinate amounts of time around Tony Stark, she stopped hanging around the lab.

It worked for two days, until she ran into Tony—and, fuck, when had she started to think of him by his first name?—in the kitchen.

It was afternoon, the liminal hours between two and five where nothing seemed to happen and time passed slowly. Natasha was baking a pie for no reason other than because she could. Apple, because Steve was back in the Tower, had been for a few weeks, and she wanted to see if him liking apple pie was real or propaganda.

“At least you’ve been avoiding me for pie,” Tony said as he brushed past her for coffee. He was close enough that she could feel the air shift—and, yes, the kitchen was large, but it had an island in the center. It wasn’t unusual that people needed to brush past each other when moving around.

What _was _unusual was the way she didn’t become hyperaware of her surroundings when it happened.

Which meant that at some point, Natasha had come to trust Tony Stark in her space.

What the hell?

But before she could puzzle on that more—on how her instincts could fail her so spectacularly in this way—she processed his words.

“I’m not avoiding you,” she said.

“Uh, yeah, you are. You haven’t been down to the lab in two days.”

“So?”

“So when’s the last time you went two days without coming down to the lab?”

“Two weeks ago,” she answered immediately.

Tony rolled his eyes. “Because I was on a business trip in Tokyo. And even then, you checked in on the bots a couple times, because they like you better than Bruce.”

He… had a point.

Natasha did not want to concede that he had a point.

They stared at each other, unblinking, neither willing to back down. Natasha longed, momentarily, for the days when Tony wouldn’t meet her gaze.

“You’ve seen me for training,” she pointed out.

He rolled his eyes. “C’mon, Natasha. What’s up?”

And it… shouldn’t get to her. But something about the way he used her given name (well, her _chosen _name) so casually did. So she answered as honestly as she knew how. “I don’t understand you.”

Tony snorted. “That’s not new.”

“No,” she agreed. “But before, I thought I did. And then I thought I could. But… I don’t.”

He narrowed his eyes. “And this has to do with you avoiding me how?” There was something sharp in his words, an undercurrent that hinted he might lash out soon—if provoked.

Tony Stark was very capable of lashing out as a means of deflecting. But if he lashed out, it tended to mean he was avoiding showing something else.

So… why was he hurt? If, as he said, he knew that she had been trying to figure him out, to understand him, then… what?

It took her a moment to get it. But then she realized what she’d been realizing all along—that honesty was her best policy when it came to dealing with him. “I didn’t stop coming around because I gave up on figuring you out,” she said carefully. “I stopped coming around because I realized I wasn’t spending time with you _only _to figure you out.”

It was as opaque as she could be. Transparency wasn’t in her nature.

Luckily, reading between the lines was in his. “You didn’t know we were friends.”

“I don’t have friends.”

“You have Clint,” he pointed out, but rather than being a retort, it was almost a question.

“Exactly. I have Clint, and no one else. I don’t have _friends.” _

He nodded. It wasn’t the slow nod that showed he was holding back, either; it was the rapid-fire nodding he did when he was puzzling through something and about to figure out the answer. He must have lit on it, because he grinned a thousand-watt smile that should have looked insincere but didn’t and said, “I don’t have many friends either.”

“I know.”

“But we’re friends.”

Natasha sighed. “Apparently.”

He nodded. “Okay.” And then he turned and walked away. But before he was out of the kitchen completely, he called back over his shoulder, “You should come visit the bots soon. They’re moping, and that means they’re even less productive than usual. If Stark Industries collapses, I’ll tell Pepper it’s your fault!”

Natasha, may any and all deities help her, liked this man.

They were friends.

**

The first time Tony ever knocked Natasha on her ass while they were sparring, she was grudgingly impressed.

Yes, she took him down the next moment and pinned him, but it was progress.

He crowed about it incessantly for a week.

Steve looked surprised, but then, he still pulled his punches the few times he agreed to spar with her. Natasha didn’t think it was the woman aspect of her so much as the unenhanced human aspect, because he pulled his punches with Clint, too.

Clint rolled his eyes. Thor congratulated Tony and asked if they could spar—the only thing yet to dim Tony’s excitement at all. Bruce was in his lab making some kind of discovery that would save lives, so he was exempt from the crowing for now.

Natasha went from grudgingly impressed to proud when he managed it again a few days later, proving that it hadn’t been a fluke.

“Good work,” she told him when she helped him up after taking him down that time.

He gasped dramatically like the asshole he was, hand over his chest, the arc reactor’s light glowing from between his fingers. “Did you just give me a compliment?”

“No,” she said. “It was positive reinforcement.”

“It was a compliment,” Tony said decisively, ignoring her.

She rolled her eyes. “Whatever you say.”

**

One year from the Battle of New York, Natasha looked back on the footage. She saw the raw potential in their teamwork, even if it was shoddy at times, each of them too used to following their own agendas. They’d begun to practice together in recent months, now that they all lived in the Tower more or less full time, and she could tell that they’d improved already.

She found her eyes tracking Tony’s movements in the footage they had. His fighting style had changed since she had started training him to fight, incorporating more of the things she’d taught him. But it wasn’t just his fighting style that she was watching.

She didn’t understand Tony Stark—not completely—and maybe she never would. If you’d asked Natasha a year ago if she could trust him, she would have probably said no. If you’d asked her a year ago if she could trust someone she couldn’t reliably predict, she would have said no for certain.

So maybe she’d changed, too, and become less predictable and knowable herself. That almost didn’t surprise her—if she knew one thing about Tony Stark, it was that everything he touched felt the forces of entropy and moved toward chaos.

They weren’t alike in many ways. They had a similar drive, a similar focus, that allowed them to find common ground. But in other ways, they were like two sides of the same coin: opposite, but balanced out by one another.

Whatever the case, she was glad they were on the same team, just as much as she could admit, if only privately and to herself, that she was glad to know him. She trusted him to have her back both in and out of the field, but it was more than that. The relationship she’d had with Tony was something more than she’d anticipated or thought possible. It was a quiet but steady friendship, not quite something that either of them was used to. It wasn’t like her friendship with Clint; it didn’t seem to be something Tony could predict or explain either. Something drew them together, and Natasha couldn’t help but wonder where they would find themselves in the years to come.

But for the first time, she started to feel like maybe while she’d been watching Tony, she’d been discovering parts of herself that had previously seemed unknowable—at least, unknowable to her. She liked the self she had found just as much as she liked the parts of Tony she’d uncovered.

That was maybe the biggest surprise of all.


End file.
